How Long Do You Need to Keep Food Safety Records in the UK?

There's no fixed number — just "an appropriate period"

There's a persistent myth in food safety circles that the law tells you exactly how long to keep your records. It doesn't. Regulation (EC) 852/2004 — the rule that underpins UK food hygiene law — says records should be kept for "an appropriate period," based broadly on the shelf life of the food you're handling. No fixed number of months. No neat table you can point an inspector to. It's left to the business to decide what's reasonable.

In practice, most guidance and most businesses settle on keeping daily records — temperature checks, cleaning schedules, opening and closing checks — for around 12 months. It's not a legal minimum, it's just become the sensible convention: long enough to cover a full seasonal cycle, short enough that you're not drowning in paper you'll never look at again.

And that's before you've actually thought about what a year of that looks like in paper.

The scary number: 208 sheets a year, one site

One sheet a week each for cleaning, opening checks, closing checks and temperature logs is four sheets a week. Fifty-two weeks. That's 208 individual sheets, for one site, in a single year. Multiply that across a multi-site business and you're not managing food safety anymore, you're running a filing operation.

I spent a long stretch of my career doing exactly that — independent bakeries early on, BRC-audited wholesale environments later — and the volume of paper never really got easier to deal with, it just got better organised. Filing cabinets. Binders labelled by month. The occasional sheet that got a coffee ring on it, or went missing entirely because someone filed it in the wrong month. None of that is a reflection of anyone doing their job badly. It's just what happens when your record-keeping system is physical and your business runs every single day.

What actually gets checked isn't the full year

Here's the bit that actually matters in reality, though: what an inspector wants to see is rarely the full year. In my experience, what gets asked for is recent, complete evidence — a run of two or three months where every check is filled in properly, consistently, with sensible corrective actions where something went wrong. That's what demonstrates you have a working system, not a folder that goes back to last January. The full year matters for your own due diligence and traceability. It's not usually what gets pulled out and scrutinised in the room.

Accidents are a different regime — and a different problem to store

Accidents are a different regime entirely, and a different problem to store.

RIDDOR sets a genuine legal minimum here: accident records must be kept for at least 3 years. But 3 years is the floor, not the sensible target. Best practice — and what most health and safety guidance actually recommends — is 6 years, which lines up with the limitation period for civil claims. If a child is involved, that clock doesn't even start until they turn 18, which means records can need keeping for well over a decade. If there's any hazardous substance exposure involved, you're potentially looking at keeping records indefinitely.

So sit with that for a second: where do you physically keep an accident record for 6+ years? Not in the cupboard with this year's temperature logs — that gets cleared out. Somewhere separate, somewhere it won't get lost in a site move, a refit, or someone having a clear-out because "it's from years ago." I've seen accident books survive site closures, ownership changes and refurbishments purely by luck, sitting in a box nobody quite had the heart to throw out and nobody had a proper system for keeping either.

Where digital actually earns its keep

This is really where digital stops being a nice-to-have and starts solving an actual problem. It's not just that it's easier than paper — it's that paper genuinely struggles to match two different jobs at once: keeping enough history to be useful, and not becoming an unmanageable archive. In Culinary Key, cleaning, temperature, opening and closing checks are stored automatically and kept on a rolling 12-month basis — which mirrors that sensible industry convention, so you've always got a full year of complete history behind you without ever having to think about it, and older sheets don't pile up into something nobody will ever open again. Accident and incident records are different: those aren't on that rolling cycle, they simply stay, because a 3-year legal minimum stretching potentially to a decade or more isn't something you want depending on a binder surviving a site refit.

And when an inspector does ask for that recent, complete run of records — the two or three months that actually gets checked — it's a search and a filter, not a trip to the store cupboard. That's the whole point of moving this off paper: not that the rules changed, but that keeping up with them stops depending on someone's memory of which box file has March in it.